The Enterprise factor

Many found the change of name from Borland to Inprise quite ridiculous.
To take cheap shots at Borland for this move is quite hypocritical though. This
was only a very visible effect of a trend that started much earlier and is not
limited just to Inprise. Marketing departments of software publishers and of IT
companies in general have definitively adopted this word as a favourite
(alongside worse ones such as leverage).

The irony of this situation is that the E word is most prominent in the
discourse of companies that were originally targeting exclusively the (lonely)
desktop. It feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we keep repeating the E
word enough it'll have to become true!

Daryl Plummer, VP and Research Director (Application Development Tools
and Technology) at the Gartner Group, mentioned in a recent presentation that
about 20% of all applications developed are enterprise applications. This might
surprise you as being very little, but for the Gartner Group, enterprise
software means high volume transaction applications that manage the core
business of an enterprise. A fair definition.

In the case of Inprise and most of its competitors, the E word has many
very different meanings. Brian Ledbetter, Product Manager at Inprise, considers
it to be a combination of three things: software that is not just a boxed
product, support (often done in partnership with system integrators), and a
comprehensive solution. At the same time he also defines the E word as being a
departure from Windows NT, internally the word implies support for Windows NT
and 95, Unix, AS/400, mainframes, and packages such as SAP. The first
definition, which covers offering TP Monitors, might lead to systems fitting
the Gartner Group definition.

On the other hand, the second definition partly fits another situation
that has arisen these last few years, ie it is used mainly to differentiate
product offerings from ‘standard’ and ‘professional’
editions. In this latter context (replacing what were called Client/Server
editions), what is it if not a licence to print money?

The main difference between the enterprise edition and all the others is
database support. These days, apart from specialised fields such as embedded
systems, everyone at some point or another needs to access a database, and it
even sometimes make sense to have a database in an embedded product. If you can
guarantee that you'll never ever need to write any code that accesses a
database, the professional edition might be enough. But even then sometimes you
still need the enterprise edition to receive more comprehensive documentation.
As to the standard editions, they really feel like a learning tool or a taster
for the real thing.

As Dave Jewell mentioned on Cix, perhaps all this should be attributed
to a misspent youth watching too much Star Trek.